Briefing Detail Page

Change Text Size:

Medicare 101

Monday, March 16, 2009

Medicare covers nearly 45 million beneficiaries, including 38 million seniors and 7 million younger adults with permanent disabilities. The program is expected to cost the federal government approximately $477 billion in 2009, accounting for 13 percent of federal spending and 19 percent of total national health expenditures.

Whom does Medicare serve and what services does it cover? What are Medicare Parts A, B, C and D? How is it structured and financed? What drives Medicare’s costs? How does Medicare reimburse providers and hospitals? What future challenges face the program?

To address these and related questions, the Alliance for Health Reform and the Kaiser Family Foundation sponsored a March 16 briefing. Panelists were: Juliette Cubanski, principal policy analyst with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation; Marilyn Moon, vice president and director of the health program at American Institutes for Research; and Tom Gustafson, senior policy advisor at Arnold & Porter LLC. Diane Rowland of the Foundation and Ed Howard of the Alliance moderated.

Diane Rowland, executive vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, set the stage for the Medicare 101 briefing on March 16, cosponsored by the foundation. (4 min.) Ed Howard, executive vice president of the Alliance, and Dr. Rowland co-moderated.

Juliette Cubanski, principal policy analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation, discussed Medicare's benefits and gaps at the March 16 briefing, cosponsored by the foundation. (13 min.)

Marilyn Moon, vice president and health program director at the American Institutes for Research, discussed current and projected Medicare spending at the March 16 briefing cosponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation. (14 min.)

Webcast: The Emerging Biosimilars Market

Open Enrollment Preview: Checking the Vitals of the Marketplaces

The Affordable Care Act's health insurance marketplaces rely on robust competition to control costs and to provide consumer choice. But the decisions of several large insurers to scale back their 2017 marketplace participation, and the failure of many health insurance co-ops will leave marketplace shoppers in many states with fewer choices than they had in 2016. Furthermore, those insurers remaining in the exchanges have often found their marketplace customers to be less healthy than they projected, and they are raising premiums in response. Our briefing focuses on these trends, what they mean for the long-term viability of the marketplaces, and what public policy steps can be taken to bring more healthy people into the risk pool and to encourage insurer participation in the individual market.